Explore where you live.

But Penn State is not just a place. It’s a family without boundaries and an idea without borders.

As it approaches 600,000 living alumni, there is a community that stretches across the nation.

As a leader in agriculture, climate change and defense research, it has global give and take. Students and professors come from around the world, and they flow back to other countries and continents, exploring sciences, cultures, languages and history.

Penn State has more than 7,000 students receiving assistance from International Student Advising on the various campuses to maintain their immigration status while studying at the university.

And with that worldly perspective, there is a camaraderie with people around the world, an understanding of human conditions and empathy for what happens.

That showed Tuesday as Old Main lit up in the colors of liberty, equality and fraternity out of solidarity for the people of Paris. It showed last year when Penn State students symbolically lay silent and still in the HUB-Robeson Cultural Center. It shows every year when students from across the campuses, even from the online World Campus, raise millions of dollars for children with cancer through Thon.

The causes are not all things everyone agrees with. The university is no different than the rest of the world, with people who have feelings, opinions, prejudices and favorites. For everyone praying for the French on the Old Main lawn, there was someone wondering where the support was for the victims of a bombing in Beirut. The Black Lives Matter movement was answered by calls that blue lives matter, too.

But the struggle to be heard, the fight to make a difference, the call to join the cause — that is something that Penn State students and alumni, faculty and staff continue to engage.